designswarm thoughts

I’ve specifically _tried_ as much as I can to avoid the subject of women, gender equality and tech in this blog for years but this was an invitation I simply could not refuse. I’m also writing this down running out of time and needing to pack a suitcase, so this should be quick don’t worry.

Quote 1: “It’s just that until women have role models who are willing to risk incarceration to get ahead, they’ll miss out on channelling smaller amounts of self-promoting con artistry to get what they want, and if they can’t do that, they’ll get less of what they want than they want.”

Comment 1:
- Amelia Earhart
- Joan of Ark
- Suffragettes
- Benhazir Bhutto

also about the ones not dead:
- Anna Wintour
- Zaha Hadid
- Paola Antonielli
- Kathy Sierra
You get my drift.

Quote 2: “They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.”

Comment 2:
- Ghandi
- Nelson Mandela
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
Oh, you meant white men I guess.

Quote 3: “What I do know is this: it would be good if more women see interesting opportunities that they might not be qualified for, opportunities which they might in fact fuck up if they try to take them on, and then try to take them on. It would be good if more women got in the habit of raising their hands and saying “I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,” no matter how many people that behavior upsets.”

Comment 3: I know _plenty_ of men in tech who would never dream of doing that and who sit there, not living up to their full potential. When talking about the elite, one must perhaps consider one’s expectations carefully. There is also a dramatic difference between the US attitude to performance and the rest of the world, perhaps why it hasn’t been blessed with the best of reputations. A loud obnoxious man (we’d say a wanker in England) is changing your country for the worse Clay, just now, probably because he is confident, louder and is lying about being able to do the job. Fabulous.

So with inflammatory rants, and I’ve been the first to start them in the past, I’ve learnt something important: more than anything else on the subject of women in tech, education, design, let us not wallow in the valley of despair. It’s completely unhelpful, makes people angry and gives out more bad vibes than not. As a woman in design and tech, let me grow in that field, make my own place and find my own voice. It won’t be a man’s, I assure you. It might take me time, but I’ll get there.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium on “The City as a Platform” in fabulous NYC last week and thought i’d share my Ignite-style talk. This event and talk was an opportunity for me to do 4 things:

- talk about something that’s related to my design interests

- break the Ignite format (as I did with Interesting)

- Reflect on the current discourse around cities (more on that below)

- see friends and meet people I’d not had the opportunity to have a proper chat with before (nod to Christian, Aaron and Adam and Jennifer )

So I had a long hard think about the theme and decided that instead of doing what a lot of internet-types are doing which is to see the city from above (maps and all) or from below (infrastructure and all) or even the surface of it (advertising and LED walls), I was going to focus on what makes my experience of cities (having lived in large ones like Amsterdam, Paris, London, Milan, Montreal) unique and enjoyable. A user’s experience. I quickly realised that most of it had _nothing_ to do with anything technology related. You might argue that by not owning an iPhone (gasp!) I’m missing out. Perhaps, but I’m happy with what I found.

Wanting to highlight these aspects of cities, I did something I hadn’t done in a while: I wrote. I used to love writing fiction in school as a girl and this was a lot of fun. So it kindof ended up as a photo montage of sorts with a piece of text, probably because I’ve been watching La Jetée.

If you manage to guess the order of all the cities pictured, comment below and you win a plate.

Airports. Everything starts with an airport when you start with a city. Bergamo, Heathrow, Gatwick Schipol, JFK, Trudeau. All the same in some ways, all offering the same entry point to a city: a view from above. Sometimes you can see it as clearly as a google map, but often its at night, and it only reveals its glowing downtown, like woven by a moth with luminescent silk.

The sounds. Police sirens, shouting in a market, ambulances, arguing, honking, pigeons, church bells, the sound of a kiss, a pair of high hells on the pavement, the muffled sound of boots through snow or leaves.

Time. The time it takes to have a shower, order coffee, take the underground, metropolitana, subway, train, bus. Waiting there, with some music in your ears perhaps to kill the time, the boredom, chop it off in 3 mn slices. The time to walk your daughter to school, check your email, see a movie, eat a meal with a friend, walk the dog in the park.

The hip place to be, the right café, the right exhibition, the right pub, apperitivo, the right time to get there, 8pm, 10pm, 1am, 3am. The way to order a cocktail, stampot, koffie verkiert, flat white, the right clothes, the right skinny jeans, the right look. Feeling hip, seeing others recognise it.

Fall in love in the subway, in a gallery, in a bar. So much lust and dreams clashing, bumping into each other. The parties, friends gossiping, people jogging at 5am, on Christmas day even, making everyone jealous, old couples ignoring each other at a restaurant.

Sitting in the same café, or maybe a different one. Eavesdropping people talking about their mother, their latest vacation, their aspirations, complaints, gossip, criticism.

Layers of sounds, stories, histories that melt, meet, separate again, never quite belonging to each other.

All the people that make up a city. If no one lived here, would it still earn that title?

Manhattan, Un Americano a Roma, Paris je t’aime, Love Actually, Gotham City, Blade Runner, you’re in a city because you want to be in love. You’re in love with it, with what it could be, with what it isn’t quite. It loves you, rejects you, elevates you, helps you, pushes you forward or away, supports you, allows you to live, to work, to survive, to thrive, to go places, to move on elsewhere, to stay there forever.

The city and its ins and outs. In it, under a roof, in a museum, a factory, an apartment building, a council estate. People stacked on top of each other, never more than 3m apart.The patina of the out, the graffiti, the architecture, the heights of it.

The city where everyone is from everywhere else. It’s constantly trying to be what those people want from a home, made up of foreign words, made up of nostalgia of where they came from and where they are now. Could be anywhere but its here, a patchwork that makes no sense, that doesn’t belong to one time, but every year and every decade is written in brick, in cement, in iron, in wires.

The view. Always the view. You own the city and it owns you. The birds constantly watching over you.

Lights, signage, flickering.I am in a city that I don’t know but recognise. Yellow, blues, greens, black, white, movement, music playing next door. Posters, ads, all telling me what I should care about right now. I glance away, ignoring the glow of information, I’m too busy crossing the street.

Walking. Sense of scale, sense of how long it takes me to get to the end of the block, the end of the line, the end of town. When does the city stop exactly? When there is less? How much less? How much more? I’m going everywhere, and nowhere. Slow things down by walking. Let the scale hit me, look up. Look at how tall it all feels.

I’m one of those people who, in order to thoroughly enjoy a book, underlines my way through it. I re-read this one in the last month and thought i’d write things down down. They won’t make much sense outside of the context of the book and maybe that’s what’s interesting to a certain extent. I’ve started thinking that privacy and identity is actually very easy to hide once the general context has been lost.

For you, dear readers, these will be bits of sentences which I am sharing, not because I know you’ll understand them, but because I know you won’t ;)

page 30:
“Mais des tas de fois c’est comme ca, et presque tout le temps: on découvre à la fin que la souffrance, toute cette souffrance-là, était inutile, on a souffert comme des betes et c’était inutile, ca n’était ni juste ni injuste, ni bete, ni moche, c’était simplement inutile, et tout ce que tu peux dire à la fin c’est ca: c’était une souffrance inutile”

page 140
“peindre le rien”

page 153
“s’il y avait une solution une femme la découvrirait, ne serait-ce que par une complicité objective entre enigmes”

page 180
“ou tu regardes, ou tu joues”

page 219
“C’était un mélange de force indiscutable et de solitude définitive. Il les mettait à l’abri de toutes les défaites, et de tous les bonheurs. Ainsi ils perdaient, invaincus, toute leur vie.”

page 232
“Car c’est exactement ainsi qu’apparait la position destinale de l’homme: etre face au monde, avec soi-meme dans le dos.”

page 334
“la cruauté c’est la vertu par excellence des médiocres”

page 476
“la belle époque: on mangeait bien et les heures passaient vite”

A bit of a tradition started 3 years ago by a canadian friend. I think it’s as good a way as any to recap.

1.What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?
Missed a flight.

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Really didn’t as far as I can remember. I have a lot on next year’s list as a result.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes, plenty. More significantly Caroline my best friend in Canada.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No.

5. What countries did you visit?
France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, Netherlands.

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
Perspective

7. What date from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory?
Easter Friday

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Keeping my company going through a recession.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Totally putting the essentials of my life aside to make 8. happen.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Yes

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Japanese school-girl bag.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Obama for making me not want to puke anymore when i go to the US.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Amy Whinehouse

14. Where did most of your money go?
My business.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Working with great people on exciting projects!

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2009?
Mrs Cold by Kings of Convenience

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
Much more tired.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Sports

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Travelling

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
Spent it with some friends.

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with?
Brock who works with me

22. Did you fall in love in 2009?
No

23. What was your favourite TV programme?
FireFly and Mad Men

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No

26. What was the best book(s) you read?
Makers by Cory Doctorow
Book of Dave by Will Self

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Wild Beasts

28. What did you want and get?
To move somewhere with a garden

29. What did you want and not get?
Peace of mind

30. What were your favourite films of this year?
Up

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 29 and spent it with friends in London

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
More money

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
Back to black

34. What kept you sane?
My friends and family and horrible 80s pop classics

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Toni Servillo & James McAvoy

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
American elections

37. Who did you miss?
Friends across the world, Caroline more than most.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Ben

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009.
You can only really choose one between fame and fortune. They rarely come together.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year?

Every shooting stars in one night
The water and sand in our eyesight
The rocks in our hands preparing for flight
The lack of sleeping but it’s alright

If you fancy at all, do link to your own list!

Good conferences are about managing expectations: the speakers’ and the audience’s. They’ve paid to attend, the speaker has probably paid to fly over and add their professional profile to making the event worth going to in the first place. Both parties should be cared for.

At the end of a realllly long year and looking at Dopplr I’ve spoken or organised workshops at 12 different conferences this year and thought I’d come up with a few points about what I know makes me a better speaker. This might not apply to others, but I know it would make a world of difference to me.

1. Don’t ask for the presentation in advance. Chances are you’ll never get it. I’m usually juggling running my business and thinking about your event about 2 days before it starts, writing my talk in the plane/train on the way there and ready about 20 seconds before going live. So don’t bully me or treat me like a child on email with reminders. I’ll delete them.

2. Tell me who is in the room. Out of the 12 conferences only 1 gave me a spreadsheet with details about the attendees. Simple, efficient and got me to tailor my presentation to the crowd. Online communities for the conferences are only good for the attendees themselves, I don’t have the time to engage.

3. Don’t give me one of those awkward neck microphones. I’m a woman with short hair. I care about how my hair will look with your contraption on which is usually shitty.

4. Keep emails short. Just like you would if you were emailing someone you work with. I just want to know where to go and when I’m on.

5. Introduce me to people. I’ve just spoken, everyone knows about me, I don’t know them. Take me around and think about who I would get along with. This is incredibly important and I’ve found that the number of times I’ve been approached after a talk has decreased steadily as people consider adding me to twitter as a way to connect. I’m here, I’m present, this should be an opportunity to make a real connection. Help me out.

6. Pay for my travel and accomodation if you can. If you can’t, give me reasons for my I should go especially if you’re charging attendees a ton of cash. (Back to number 2 really)

7. Don’t do the whole backchannel projected behind me thing. Super distracting because people just can’t listen to you , look at your slides, a live twitter stream and their own laptop without getting totally distracted, laugh at the wrong moments and therefore totally putting me off. danah’s post is more than enough regarding that particular issue.

8. Make my badge readable and don’t make it too long. I don’t want people staring at my navel or crotch to read my already unreadable name. Actually, this applies to all badges for any conference ever made. The only 2 pieces of information you need to show is someone’s name and their company. That’s it. In BIG. No logo, no funky colours, maybe a distinction between a speaker and an attendee but make that easy too. It’s such an important piece of communication but so many conferences get it wrong or over-think it. Here’s a suggestion of what it could look like:

As we move towards an ever increasing professional connectedness and conference fatigue sets in, I think these could really make a difference.

Read one of Wired Uk’s 20 ideas worth considering for 2010 and one of them caught my eye. Clive Thomson reported on ideas from the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age and I can’t help but think that we have naturally adapted to what we so often call “information overload” in a way that doesn’t require us to design for forgetting.

One of my theories is that we’ve built up the internet as a way of finding rather than as a way of remembering, naturally allowing us to forget most of it. Digital stacks of papers and bookshelves. We’ve built up the equivalent behavior of “oh I’m sure it’s in that pile”. Digital synapses dying every day.

Just as an example, here are some things I do now as ways of forgetting:

- Use Delicious to store rather than as a reference point. I rarely look at my own bookmarks.
- Not actually remembering where a link came from, but who tweeted it instead.
- Check RSS feeds in a “watching TV”-like trance: I just click through the channels and stop on the stuff that visually catches my eye. I open my RSS reader once a week at best, and the stuff that’s at the top gets read, the rest kindof gets ignored.

We have more ways of archiving than ever but that doesn’t mean we’re interested in that archive. I was a guest lecturer last month in a design school and was shocked to find that most of the research students were pulling out was from the past 3 years at most.

Archiving doesn’t have the same qualities as a library quite yet. Maybe that’s a design opportunity, or maybe the FluidData metaphor needs to be reexamined.

In any case, I think we’re better at forgetting now than we used to and that has raised the profile of “knowledge” and “opinion” over “information” (also probably explains why blogging is not quite a dead art). The people who take the time to remember will rule us all. The rest of us, will rely on our “devices” and Google.

I decided to publish all the update emails I’d sent back home during my first year in Ivrea. It’s all there, the sweat and the tears, so if you know how to read french, enjoy.

Forgive this: a quick and dirty theory that I’ve been working on passively as I read Novecento this weekend lounging in a metal chair in the jardin Luxembourg in Paris and later as I flicked through this month’s Marie-Claire Maison in one of Brixton’s fashionable cafés.

I wonder if design as an activity, a field of practice and an economic lubricant is a way for us to survive. If we assume that desire is a fixed element in society, desire for others first, but then desire for wealth, glory, recognition, happiness, is desire of objects not an intellectual extension of that? Another mirror? Another way to tell a story about the lives we live? Another way to help us achieve the story we want to tell about ourselves?

If I am unable to connect with others in traditional ways and my social reference points are no longer in tribes, villages and local geography, is it not through the Ikea catalogue that I construct a sense of what home should be? In London, you barely get to see people’s houses, the way they live, but you can imagine them through the windows of Habitat. You can decide what your home should look like through the colour choices that Paperchase on Tottenham Court Road made on their second floor for Christmas. “That’s who I should be”, you think to yourself. In the same way, we consume fashion based on what we think is hip or what we want to communicate about ourselves, why shouldn’t it be the same with the objects we surround ourselves with? Psychological survival, the ability to chose who we are through what we show, what we buy, what we desire and what we design. The epitome of that thinking being “design art” that has emerged as its very own field of practice. Art is no longer enough, design and everyday objects need to make statements, call out to us, invite us for me, because we desire more meaning from them than they could initially give us. We long for “the other” whether that is a person or a new pair of curtain rods.

If we didn’t have that desire, if we were perfectly happy with what we had, would we not be empty? And would that be sad In the same way that lack of desire in life is seen as a bad thing and often associated with teenage angst?

Will think about this some more as I don’t think its anything new but it has been said that Pleasure disappoints, possibility never and I think our ability to recognise our dependancy to design, our addiction one might say, might be the key to separating one century’s thinking from the other.

I’ve been thinking for a while about contributing to the latest design craze among my peers: cities. I’m not an architect but I like cities as a user, as a designer, and I thought I’d write very short bursts about what I like about them, having lived for years in some of the best and most beautiful cities: Paris, Montreal, Milan, Amsterdam and now London.

I also think there’s a huge distinction to be made between travelling a lot and relocating often enough. It makes you actually taste the culture, get a model in your head of a city, the experience you have in it and what makes it great, special or horrible. Cities have voices, personalities, habits, just like the people who live in them. Hopefully I’ll write a little about each of those elements, but for this one, I’ll concentrate on graffiti or “tags” as the French would say (funny the flavour that word has now).

My theory is that you can tell how well a city is doing creatively based on its walls. Graffiti sort of end up acting as a “creative industry barometer” of a more realistic sort for me.

Milan for example (and Turin for that matter) has some beautiful paper-based ones. Most of it happens organically as well, with no money involved, anonymous but known artists like Tuboy and Humen just keep popping up and it becomes the city’s signature.

This signature can be so strong, like in the case of Amsterdam-based artist Laser 3.14, that when I saw his work appear in London’s fashionable Shoreditch, I did a double-take and looked around for my bicycle.

Then there’s graffiti as historical tourism. Bruxelles takes advantage of its walls as canvases of communication and uses them to deliberately to showcase its long history and involvement in the comic strips / books industry in Belgium and France in the 60s to late 90s. There’s even a tour you can take in the city to visit all the different “paintings” and this is where the lines get blurry and you have to ask yourself if this even counts as graffiti. Is it still a graffiti if its been commissioned. I’m sure these kids would argue otherwise.

Then you have cities who try to organise creativity on their walls and deem genuine graffiti “dirty”, such as Montreal. Only the occasional building will have a piece of art that someone chose, got a permit for, made in broad daylight. Boring. A manufactured narrative of creativity.

And in the UK, graffiti take on a more political, news-relevant flavour, like an unofficial, slow newspaper. Only the events worthy enough make it onto the walls. Another way to own the city and its narrative. To own what stays and what goes. Manufactured democracy.

So after 5 months of vacation I’ve decided to take up tweeting on my private account again. But this will be different…

- I’ve removed anyone who is too closely associated with work
- I’ve removed anyone who I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing a drunken conversation with

and basically kept anyone who I know wouldn’t mind me being me. I realised that my online presence, other than my Flickr stream is very much about my professional life and I’d quite like some down time and normality somewhere on the internet. Yes, yes that’s what Live Journal is about, but I don’t necessarily have the attention span for that…140 characters of bitching is quite enough :)

There are things about this type of criticism that makes me cringe. Things about this, that makes me feel like I’m not included in the city experience in the same way as my more testosterone-driven peers and that the entire point made in this article was obstructed by one simple statement:
“The next day I received an email from my, far more organised, girlfriend”.

Seems to me people help people go through stuff, life and things. Technology and infrastructures are not the only tool we have and social interactions count more in my opinion. When technology fails, you’ll still have to ask for directions whether you like it or not :) and whether you think your laptop is user-friendly or not is absolutely not related to your gender.

There. I feel better.

Stuff I’ve noticed is happening as I slowly crawl towards my 30s:

- Chocolate isn’t that great anymore. It’s still nice, but not as a snack, in the middle of the day or milky. And brownies are gross.

- Grey hair appears on pictures more clearly.

- Bullshit meter is at its most efficient.

- I’m less and less patient, and I was never patient to begin with.

- Spending an evening with a cup of tea and the internet seems like a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Saturday night.

- Living with housemates is for “young people”.

- Nostalgia sets in as a permanent state of mind. “In my days” is sometimes the start of a sentence. Not often. Just sometimes.

Shit.

A friend was telling me about the desert, so I googled it. never expected to see this.

View Larger Map

Makes me want to travel. Now.

I had the great honour of speaking this Saturday at what I can only describe as a great British institution and cocked up massively trying to talk 300 people into making an origami box. Failure is a good thing, it’s something you can learn from, it makes you humble and since it was only the top of the iceberg of what I wanted to talk about, I thought I’d do it here and apologise for screwing up in a totally public way.

First things first, the theme was paper and since I’d done a 15 minute session at Papercamp last Feb, Russell thought it was a good idea to invite me back. I’m sure he regrets it now. This is what I would have talked about if given a second chance (these thoughts were enhanced from speaking with the lovely Georgina Voss):

- Paper as a tool for 2D to 3D thinking in design and creativity.

- The invention of the paper bag

- How paper was soaked with a vinegar-based solution during the plague

- Ransom letters, public ads, confession postcards, shopping lists, found magazines, sketch books, scrap booking, notes left behind.

- The new world of Kindle and what it means for paper.

- Quotes from Books vs Cigarettes.

- Lots and lots of images from Un/Folded.

- The myth of the paperless office and consumption of paper and paperboard per capita in the UK:
In 2005: 201.20 KG/person/year
In 1985: 138.41
In 1975: 108.66

- The reassurance of paper

- Humphrey Bogart for good measure (don’t ask)

Instead of all of that, i decided to pick from what I thought was the simplest origami I’d seen (after staring at books my friends lent me for months). It turns out you learn so much about language, signs, importance of steps and procedural thinking in origami, that taking 300 people cold turkey through about 20 different steps in 10 minutes was a rather bad idea. I enjoyed trying though and I hope people won’t be too cross with me. I was tired of giving talks and at the time, this seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea, until half way through when only 10 people were still tagging along…oh well. Next time.

Thankfully I can’t even take credit for this expression that I picked up from Aram back in Talponia days, but that’s exactly how I feel at the moment so you’ll have to excuse the hollow sound of this blog at the moment.

Things I’m busy with include researching robots, helping with blogging for LIREC, learning about origami for some of what i’ll talk about at Interesting, managing 2 large projects at Tinker.it! convincing new people to work with us on Christmas stuff, planning on learning all about conductive threads for the V&A, throwing crunched up post-its at Peter who sits conveniently accross from me, convincing Ben to quit Goldsmiths and just work with us for the rest of his creative life, enjoying having Cefn around the office in between paragliding trips, thinking about home automation from the ground up and cheap internet-of-things and taking the occasional trip to Europe to see friends. Conferences coming up soon as well.

All of this will of course materialise in different forms. Or I might just have a nervous breakdown. Will have to schedule that in though :)